


yesterday's seven thousand years

by bittereternity



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Mentions of Mental Illness, Pre-Slash, adoption!fic, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 02:58:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittereternity/pseuds/bittereternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What if I can never love a child?” “If it’s your child, Spencer, he will be the easiest person in the world to love.”</p><p>Reid thinks about the idea of a child in his life, and turns to Hotch for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yesterday's seven thousand years

*

Someday I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, “I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in love of man.”

-          Rabindranath Tagore, _Stray Birds_

*

“What was it like to hold a child for the first time?” Alex asks him later.

“It was like forgetting,” he replies.

*

The door to his parents’ bedroom is not quite closed; if he stands close enough, he can hear the bed creak under their combined weight.

“Did you think about what the doctor said?” his father’s voice is smooth, matter-of-fact. Spencer shuffles closer to the door, one hand gripping the floor for support.

“Those doctors don’t know what they’re doing,” Mom’s reply is brusque, her voice harsh and scratchy even from the distance. _She’s been crying_.He pictures her in the bathroom with the shower turned on, careful not to attract any attention towards herself with hiccupping or loud sniffing. He pictures her tying her hair back, washing her face and applying the tiniest smudges of concealer at the corners of her eyes before coming out. Something warm and primal and purely hopeless washes over him, but the feeling’s gone before he can put a name to it.

“ _Diana_ ,” Dad’s voice in incredulous. “You know they’re just trying to help us.” A pause. “And besides, they’re right. Staying there would mean medical professionals all around you for a while. It would be for your own good. They can observe, adjust your meds, not to mention the timely therapy and support groups. It will just be for a little while, okay?”

“I’m taking my meds,” Mom’s voice is harsh, desperate. “I’m taking all those things those doctors have told me to. I will _not_ give away more of my life for them to inspect.”

“Diana--”

“They won’t let me come back,” Mom sounds like she’s on the verge of crying. “Once I go in, they’ll lock my door and I won’t be able to come back. I know it. I _know it._ ”

There’s another shuffle and he pictures Dad moving closer to Mom on the bed. Or maybe it’s the other way around. There’s only so much sounds are good for.

“No one will take you anywhere, I promise.” Dad’s voice is measured, calm, the same voice he uses to tell him that that no harm will come to him when he sleeps in the dark. It’s the voice Dad uses when he thinks he’s being irrational, Spencer suddenly realizes. When he thinks Spencer’s being _stupid_.

“They will take him away from me,” Mom sniffles once before speaking up.

“It will only be a little while, honey,” Dad repeats again. “They won’t take him anywhere, I’ll take care of him.”

There’s another muffled sound and he pictures Mom retreating to the corner of her bed, the way she sometimes does when he has to give her the bad medicine. “He’ll be right here when you come back,” Dad’s voice is earnest, frustrated, everything at once. “Don’t you think he would want you to get better?”

“He’s just a _kid_ , William,” Mom raises her voice and he shrinks a few steps further away from the door. Mom only raises her voice when she's very hurt, he remembers.

“He’s _my_ kid, William. He’s _our_ kid and he needs me. He needs both of us. How are you going to explain my absence? What happens if he can’t sleep at night and I’m not there to read him a story?”

There’s a pause before Dad answers. It would be silent except Spencer can feel his own heart thudding loudly in his chest. Yet again, a surge of hopelessness washes over him, powerful and frightening at the same time, making his fingers twitch and clench into fists at his sides.

“He will be _fine, god_ ,” Dad’s voice rises too and he presses his lips together, shrinking back into the shadows. It would be so easy to go back to his bedroom, close his door and block out all the noise from below, be blissfully unaware. And yet his feet stick to the ground, attention solely focused on the voices beyond the door. “Damn it. Diana, this is about _you_. It’s about you getting better and you’re going to let the chance to get some proper help go because you want to read him a _story_?”

Silence.

“He has to grow up and realize that his mother has a disease as much as you do.” He can picture Dad getting off the bed, walking around with his fingers twisting around each other.

“How will he grow up if you don’t let him?” Yet another burst of words from his father, frustrated and angry and he waits, waits for a whole minute before retreating but he doesn’t hear anymore from his Mom at all. He focuses all his attention on trying to catch a whisper, but Mom is silent.

*

The next morning, he comes down to breakfast and all is quiet, no traces on either of their faces of a fight the night before. It’s a good morning for Mom, she’s sitting upright and reading the newspaper, engaging him in conversation almost as soon as she catches sight of him.

They are good actors, but he can’t unknow. Can’t forget.

They are good actors but he’s better.

Over the next months, he waits and waits and waits but Mom goes nowhere, doesn’t get better.

Dad on the other hand, but this isn’t the story.

*

Hotch comes to work with a newborn baby cradled in his arms and he doesn’t understand. He stays at the sidelines and watches as everyone else promptly leave what they’re doing to crowd around him, hold the baby’s fingers, stroke his head, or even kiss his forehead like Garcia. He looks at Hotch instead, watches as he doesn’t take his eyes off the child in his arms, like the world around him doesn’t exist, like he is stuck in a fragile moment where he sees nothing other than the child in his arms.

Hotch looks at the child – _Jack,_ he's named Jack – like his existence is a miracle. Spencer knows it’s not. The lumpy, bald, wrinkled child in his arms is no more than a mass of dividing cells, having no unique characteristics that differentiate him from any other mass of cells anywhere in the world.

He should know. There are approximately 380,900 babies born in the world every day. 380,900 eggs fertilized with 380,900 sperms, the sole winners amongst billions of sperms that never make their goal, millions of eggs that are degraded, disposed.

There’s a smile on Hotch’s lips as he looks at the baby, not a smile like the one he has after a really big case, or after a narrow win. This isn’t a smile Spencer has seen before, the only word that comes to his mind is _ecstacy_.

 _He’s going to hurt you_ , he wants to tell Hotch. He pictures himself striding to Hotch amidst the crowd gathering around him, tearing the baby apart from his arms  and shielding him from it. _Don’t you see,_ his mind screams and he wonders at how no one seems to realize it but him, at how no one seems to be seeing straight but him. _Don’t you see, Hotch,_ he wants to say, _this child is going to do nothing but hurt you for the rest of your life_.

_Just like I do._

*

There’s no room for anything except logic in Spencer’s life, logic and numbers and the strings in his mind that rearrange them all together to create a world around him. Logic has no problem crushing everything else in its path.

*

Mount Everest is the highest mountain peak in the world, 8,850 metres above the sea level. He wonders what it would be like, to open your eyes for the first time and see snow-capped mountain ranges, sharp vertices cutting into the blue sky above. He wonders what it would be like, to open your eyes for the first time and see such purity.

*

His arm itches.

A harsh whisper in his ear, the prick of a needle against his arm. _Choose and you’ll do God’s will._

_Choose. Choosechoosechoosechoose –_

He closes his eyelids and just beyond them, he can see his Mom like she once was, her hair long and flowing on her back, the shine in her eyes as they travel through papers and words and universes, the exclamation of triumph when she happens upon a previously unnoticed simile.

 _Yet do not miss the moral, my good men,_ he pictures her reading to him, his lips moving silently, forming words against his will, forming words in tandem. _For Saint Paul says that all that’s written well is written down some useful truth to tell.*_

Her voice is in his ears, in his soul, aching at the soles of his feet. The needle jabs on his arm once again, _choose. Choose and you’ll do God’s will._

 _I choose me._ The words stick to the back of his throat as his head lolls backwards. His chest hurts with the effort to breathe but that’s okay, his Mom will get better now.

 _I choose myself. Kill me and do God’s will._ It will all be okay, Mom can get the proper treatment now, she will get better.

*

The words at his throat, he leans forward, whispers: _I choose Aaron Hotchner._ It’s the closest he’s come to scratching out his own voice.

It’s not that he wants to stay alive, he just doesn’t want to die like _this_.

*

He keeps an eye out for JJ on the field after she tells them that she’s pregnant. He can’t quite tell her how he feels, his mouth forming _congratulations_ before his brain can quite process what’s happening. A vague flash of disappointment flows through him, immediately replaced by a wave of incredulity.

It had never occurred to him that there were so many people out there, willing to hurt themselves over and over again. He sees ways for her to be hurt everywhere, stays one step behind her just in case she needs him to catch her. In the break room, sometimes he catches her fingers absent-mindedly stroking her abdomen with a faraway smile on her face. He retreats silently to his desk and sips more of his coffee, wonders how the same mass of dividing cells affect so many people in so many different ways.

His fingers itch after cases that come too close, the urge to wrap his fingers around her pulse and measure their stability too overwhelming. Things that wouldn’t have killed her before would take her life away in a second now. A high blood pressure, diabetes, a stumble on the stairs; he wonders how she stands it, nurturing a veritable landmine.

He goes home and reads every article he can find on birthing a child, every statistic on complications during delivery, risk factors that can send a woman into premature labor, the survival rates of a premature baby. He reads the delivery manual too, slowly and diligently, three times over, before he realizes that he has already memorized it.

*

He dreams of a dead child and his father is pulling the trigger, over and over again. His arm itches, and he allows himself a moment of imagination, just picturing the trajectory the liquid might take through his veins, the few seconds of anticipation before it will make him forget. _Finally_.

He finds himself alone in the house, slamming open door after open before he finds Michael. Before he can take stock of what’s happening, he finds himself rushing towards Michael, scooping him up with his own arms, picking him up. Kneeling on the floor, he closes his eyes and breathes. Michael wraps his arms around him without hesitation, and against his own chest, he can feel his thudding heart slow down, steadying to a regular pace. His arms tingle as he feels Michael’s shoulders slump against him as he relaxes, breathes easily.

 _He trusts me_. The thought is terrifying and sudden, invading and unfathomable.

A part of him is always five, pressed to the wall as Mom smashes the best china against the edge of the table, pointing at him with trembling fingers, screaming _get him out, get him out, I don’t want him here._

And his own heart – and his own heart is filling with a form of relief that he doesn’t understand.

*

JJ puts Henry in his arms before he can protest, and before he knows it, he finds himself with an armful of baby, wriggling and stretching in his arms, the wisps of hair on his head swaying at his movement, his tiny lips parting as he yawns.

He wonders if the baby can understand his trepidation, wonders if Henry can feel his heartbeat against his tiny little feet. And then, and then –

Henry shifts in his arms, turning to one side and clutching a corner of his tie like a pillow. He  can vaguely hear JJ giggling next to him, but he doesn’t pay attention. His throat feels constricted, and not just from Henry’s surprisingly firm grip pulling at his tie. He looks down, and Henry shifts again in his sleep, not caring a whit about his thoughts.

The thought, pure and unbidden, rushes to his mind and the words are out of his mouth before he can quell them: _I love you._ He bows down and kisses Henry on the forehead, thinks: _I will protect you from this world._

*

Later, when he’s switching off his bedside lamp and fluffing his pillows, it comes to him:

The relief he had felt while saving Michael hadn’t been because he had solved a case, it had been because he had saved a child. Saved  _him_. _  
_

So easy, so simple. He stays awake all night.

*

“Congratulations,” Hotch sits next to him in the cafeteria and passes a mug towards him. He raises an eyebrow.

“I hear you’re a godfather,” he half-raises his glass. “Congratulations.”

Spencer draws his own mug closer to his chest, fingers lacing together on the front. He says nothing.

“She made a good choice,” Hotch tells him, tilting his head in a way that he’s forced to make eye-contact.

 _She chose wrong_ , he wants to scream. He takes another sip of his coffee instead. Hotch will try to prove him wrong, he knows. There’s no arguing with someone who has already made up his mind, no one knows that more than him.

“You’ll be a good influence in his life,” Hotch continues, his eyes so earnest, so painful and  Spencer wants to understand, just for that one second, just for that expression to go away. “You’ll do good,” Hotch tells him with a smile.

He closes his eyes. He is eighteen and Mom is being dragged away by three nurses, finally going away, finally getting the attention, the help she needs. He is ten years too late and a lifetime too early.

*

Schizophrenia is a highly inheritable, polygenic disorder. The chances of developing it are directly proportional to the number of first-degree relatives afflicted with this disorder.

To Spencer, it’s nothing more than a mutual circle of hurt. He wonders if everyone lived like that, perpetually afraid of waking up one morning and not knowing the world around them.

*

Henry grows up in front of his eyes and the thought never quite goes away, it pulses through his whole being every time he sees him.

“How do you do it?” he quietly asks Hotch by the grill at a BAU picnic, jerking his head towards where Jack was teaching Henry to kick the ball.

“Do what?”

He flips another batch of steaks over. “Live with the fear that it might all go away.”

Hotch pauses. He wonders if he’d finally said too much, revealed something unpalatable about himself. But when Hotch speaks again, there’s no trace of malevolence in his voice. “I guess you just have to believe that today is enough.”

Spencer swallows and looks down. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, perhaps something different, perhaps something more.  But a second later, Hotch’s fingers wrap around his elbow.

“No,” Hotch insists and points to the distance. “Spencer, look.”

He follows Hotch’s gaze and sees JJ running towards the field, her ponytail sweeping the air. Henry sits in the middle of the ground holding his knee, and he watches as she rushes towards him, picking him up on his lap. Spencer watches, almost rapt, as she pushes his hair back and kisses his on the forehead, uses her thumb to wipe away the tears on his cheeks, pulls him closer so that he drops in a lump on top of her, sending them both to the ground. He watches as she laughs, dirt in her hair and grass on her clothes, and has eyes for no one but him.

“See?” Spencer hears Hotch’s voice in his ear, feels his hand on his elbow. “Today is enough.”

*

Henry jogs in dressed as him, even carrying a miniature version of his messenger bag, and he feels that his heart is going to explode out of his chest. For a brief moment, he stands, transfixed, awash with a feeling he can’t quite name drenching through his heart, threatening to eviscerate him with its intensity.

 _It’s love,_ he realizes later, going over that single second over and over, framing it in his memory. _It’s love_ , he realizes and it washes over all his numbers.

*

“I always thought I would be something _more_ ,” he tells Hotch, abruptly and out of the blue when they both find themselves stirring their coffees early in the morning, long before anyone else has shown up.

Hotch looks at him. “What do you mean?”

“This,” he gestures around him, and he feels his throat closing up already. He doesn’t quite know where the words came from in the first place. “More than _this_.”

Hotch raises a hand, as if he wants to pat him on the back, but he refrains.

“You are,” he says. Spencer knows he believes it, but he doesn’t understand at all.

*

Maeve’s voice stays with him long after she’s gone. He remembers her letters too, every word and every punctuation and the direction of every drop of ink that she’d spilled on paper, but her voice _stays._  Sometimes, he’s on his way back from work and he can hear her laugh, light and melodious over the buildings towering over him. Other times, he’s in the middle of case and the sounds around him transform into the chant of her name. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, sweat sticking to his forehead and terror behind his eyes, Maeve’s name on his lips.

He tries to think of a good way to ask Mom when she started showing symptoms, but he can’t come up with a good way to write _I think my dead girlfriend is coming back to me in my hallucinations._

Sometimes, when he’s too tired, he dreams of other things: the sound of tiny feet running on wooden floors, waking up to a small, warm body jabbing him on the chest, making pancakes while two chubby, tiny hands threaten to knock the eggs out of his hands. On those mornings, he wakes up in a sweat too, but there’s something else.

*

Hope is a terrifying thing; it sneaks up on you through all the terrible corners where logic doesn’t reach.

*

He finally gives in and types the words in a search engine, wondering how they would look, typed in bold, staring back at him. His heart pounds in his chest as he presses ‘enter’, knees shaking and his throat dry. He thinks he might throw up any second.

There is information everywhere, on every website he finds. There are statistics and numbers, testimonials and ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, application forms and interactive tutorials. They are categorized by countries too: Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, China - 

_Choose and ---_

There are more choices than he’s ever contemplated, more information than he has ever thought of absorbing, more pictures than he’s ever encountered before. The whole world, terrifying and vast, has opened up under his fingertips.

He prints a few brochures out and watches the colors as the papers emerge from the printer, fresh and warm and glossy. Picking up a highlighter, he begins to read.

*

“What if I can never love someone?” he asks Hotch at the most inopportune of moments, on their way to interrogate an unsub in Phoenix.

“What?” Hotch steers the car with one hand, fiddles with his Kevlar on the other.

“What if I can never love someone?” he repeats, feeling even sillier. “Like a child,” he elaborates. “What if I can never love a child?”

“Oh,” Hotch’s voice is halting, as if it’s coming from a distance. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Why not?”

“If it’s your child,” he gives Spencer a sideways glance, “he will be the easiest person in the world to love.”

Spencer wants to ask more, but they’ve arrived.

*

The baby in his arms feels like –

It’s like unraveling, coming undone for the first time at the hands of a human being so small, so tiny and wrinkled and splotchy that he’ll never remember this moment. Never remember what he’s done for someone else even before he was conscious of the world. It’s like every moment in his life has led to this, been validated by this.

Spencer looks at the child in his arms, this bald and wrinkly and wriggling mass of cells and—

He doesn’t remember anything else.  One moment, only him and a child he doesn’t know, sleeping, breathing, _alive_ in his arms, and he forgets the world.

*

“What was it like to hold a child for the first time?”

“I think I was more focused on getting his father to give up the sharp object.”

“Yes, but after. When he was born. When you held him.”

“I _have_ held a baby before, you know.”

“Spencer, that child came into this world because of _you_. You will always be the first person in the whole world to hold him. Nothing is ever going to change that.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“You must have felt _something_.”

“Well-”

“Spencer,what did it feel like?”

“It felt like forgetting.”

*

“You were great today,” Hotch catches up with him as he’s refilling his drink, after the crowd at the bar starts winding down. He clears his throat, scratchy and parched from too much karaoke.

“Why weren’t you singing with us up there?” He tilts his head towards the stage, vague profiles of a couple he doesn’t know swaying to the rhythm.

Hotch laughs. Spencer likes the way he smiles, brief and all teeth, before it blooms over the rest of his face. “You don’t want me to sing, believe me.”

Spencer picks up his drink from the counter and leans back against it. Hotch picks up his drink too, presses his hand on his shoulder for a second too long before moving away. “You’ll be a great parent,” Hotch tells him, tilting his head to meet his eyes. He says the words like he believes them, like he would stake his knowledge on them, like he has no idea what more they could _mean_.

Spencer gives him a tight-lipped smile in response. He thinks of the brochures on his desk at home, neatly arranged in a pile, categorized by population, sorted by color.

*

When he drops the pile of brochures on Hotch’s desk, one evening after everyone has left, it feels like the right thing to do. He’s calm and collected and thinking clearer than he he has been in a long time. All his calm disappears out of the window as soon as Hotch picks up the first page, frowning slightly at him in confusion.

For a few minutes, there’s silence. He shakes his foot against the table.

Hotch opens his mouth and he has to actively resist closing his eyes. He holds his breath and waits, waits for everything, waits for nothing. This means everything, this means _more_. This is his more.

“What if you get shot on a case tomorrow?” Hotch finally speaks and his words are heavy but his voice is light, a small smile at the end of his lips. Reid breathes, feels like a weight has been lifted off of him, like he can finally breathe, like he's passed a test.

“Then,” he answers, the words coming so easily that he wonders how it had taken him so long to find them, “this will be enough.”

*

He opens the door in the evening to find Hotch standing on the other side, a small box in his hand, wrapped in blue with a neatly wrapped pink bow.

“I got something for you,” Hotch tells him, looking around like he doesn’t quite know what to do with this feet. _Cute_ is the word that comes to his mind, and he smiles, despite the oddity of the situation.

“What is it?” he asks once he’s ushered him in and they are both seated amidst the books strewn on his couch. Hotch puts the box in his hand and turns to face him.

“Open it,” he says.

Spencer frowns, before looking down at the package in his hands. It’s relatively small and when he shakes it, it remains silent. It’s heavy too, heavier than he thought it would be. He removes the bow and tears through the wrapping paper and tape and cardboard, not quite trusting himself to speak during the process.

“It’s a _globe_ ,” he finally breathes as he lays it down gently, reverently on the table. It’s a miniature globe,  small enough to be a toy but heavy enough that he thinks that it’s probably some form of a collector’s item. Countries and capitals and oceans stare back at him, and he doesn’t understand.

“I don’t understand,” he finally says.

He expects Hotch to be disappointed or surprised but instead, he leans over to pick the globe from the table and sets it between the palms of his empty hands. With deft, sure fingers, he sets it spinning, and Spencer can do nothing more than _watch,_ look at the world around him spin and come back into focus.

“See?”  Hotch asks him but he doesn’t, not quite, not enough. “The world is waiting for you. All you have to do is choose.”

*

 _Dear Mom,_ he writes again and again before crumpling tens of drafts of his letters and throwing them away towards a corner of his bedroom. He doesn’t quite know what to say, how to tell her about everything, all of _this,_ and  instead, he spends letter upon letter describing the mediocrity in his life. The crowd at the subway, the coffee machine that doesn’t work anymore, the drycleaners switching his clothes with someone else’s. He suspects that she knows somehow.

 _A mother always knows_ , he remembers.

In the end, it’s quite simple when the idea finally strikes him. He takes another, fresh sheet of paper and  staples some of the brochures he has shortlisted to it. The parts that he likes, he highlights in green.

 _Dear Mom,_ he writes in a corner, _why mess with perfection._

*

**Author's Note:**

> * - taken from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
> 
> title taken from _the rubayyat of omar khayyam_ :  
> [...]To-morrow? -- Why, To-morrow I may be  
> Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.
> 
> also, this *is* a 'thinking about adoption'!fic. i realize that it might be a bit confusing because i don't explicitly use these words anywhere because apparently i like vague? but i just wanted to clarify. enjoy!


End file.
